Sky

I don’t feel bad when poets are forgotten. We are highly forgettable beings. Very often, the children of poets try to forget them and fail. Poets can be pains in the ass. I once dreamed that poets became discarded shoes without a match when they died—the kind of shoes you often encounter while walking down a street or by the rail road tracks. Sometimes, these shoes are still in good shape, and are your size, but they are always missing their partner. Oh Alas! If we lived in a world where it was ok to wear unmatched shoes, I might value poets more.

But, putting this aside, discarding it like a three inch “fuck me” pump, I will say that I get very sad when good poems are forgotten. And so, I want to remember a good poem by a poet who was once prominent, and who is now seldom on the lips of graduate students (unless they think their professor will be impressed): Michael Benedikt.

Michael Bendikt, like many prominent second generation New York School poets, was involved in the visual arts. He was a true New Yorker, and spent the last few years of his life fighting eviction, and never leaving his apartment for fear they’d put a padlock on it. He also had advanced emphysema, which often puts a permanent damper on a man who inhabits a city where people walk everywhere.

His companion for the last 20 years of his life was Laura Boss, the editor of Lips magazine. Laura was good to Michael, and that’s an understatement. If Laura was a country song, she’d be “stand by your man.” It is not easy to stand by an agoraphobic poet in an epic eviction proceeding. As I said, poets are unmatched shoes.

I met him once. Laura runs a reading series out of a Barnes and Noble in New Jersey. I could not believe love could get a true second generation New York poet who had been widely anthologized and published by Wesleyen to come out to a Barnes and Noble in Jersey, but love has some strange powers. There he was, like a rare European bird blown off his migration route by a fierce ocean storm and perching on the neighbor’s satellite dish. He had a nice head of hair (I always notice hair). He was one of the first contemporary poets I read. I read him in the anthology Young Poets of 1965. This was September of 1995. This meant the young poets of 1965, of whom the youngest was Louise Gluck, were now in their fifties and sixties, and so it looked to me as if he were dressing up as an old person when, in fact, he was an old person. He was a nice looking man, and well mannered—not at all full of himself. He even sat through the open reading. Apparently, he was listening because he approached me and said: “I really like the way the way you make hyperbolic structures and then poke pins in them.” I did what you should never do. I asked him to sign his book, Sky, which I had purchased at a used book store for fifty cents (It had cost two dollars when it was first published). I explained that I hardly ever buy the books of single poets, and prefer anthologies, but had felt compelled to get his book when I read him in Young Poets of 1965. I larded on the compliments, hoping he would fail to notice that I was not buying his most current book (I had only six dollars and twelve cents in my wallet—not much wiggle room). He was gracious, and signed it: “With best wishes to Joe Weil, a really interesting, and skillfully droll poet.” Here is a poem I enjoy from that book called, “Go Away:”

Go away, go away, and as soon as you come back
Be something better.
For example a shell– one that has lain for days on the edge of a
beach, overturned and sparkling, light captured on an edge,
An oak-leaf-like cluster of sunlight that filters through elm
branches,
An earring bobbing like a float at high tide, against the neck of
somebody very sweet,
A weather beaten, moth eaten coverlet,
Or the arrows on the arm of a diving suit or a space suit
indicating
where to thrust through the arms.
Think: in reference to the mainstream of human desires and
wishes
What would you know now, if you briefly waved goodbye to the
world?

Go away, go away Michael Benedikt and come back as something better: for example, one of your poems. Go—and whisper to roses.